90 Comments

  1. Oddly enough I use my real name everywhere – as a pseudonym!

    When I meet people in Meat Space who have only ever known me online, I’m not “Jason Jordan”, I’m “jasonjordan” as that’s how they know me from Twitter (@jasonjordan) and my Blog (jasonjordan.com.au).

    It affords me no privacy or protection, but it does make me stand by my words.

    And there’s great power there.

    1. I feel the same way about SilkCharm. With nearly 35,000 followers, I can’t really escape or have privacy or protection. Too many know my history and background. Accountability works with the name you use the most.
      I suspect Crikey journo Stilgherrian protects his nickname Stilgerrian a lot more than his real name. Which could be jasonjordan for all I know. 🙂

  2. Thanks for the great read, Laurel/SilkCharm.

    When people talk to me about online forums, it’s often the comments sections of newspapers online that they get heated over. They can be awful spaces, but as you’ve pointed out, the media isn’t managing those spaces as an online community. While the traditional media is gradually appointing ‘social media managers’ within newsrooms, they don’t seem to have grasped the role of ‘community manager’. And that’s why we’re seeing debates like the recent ones in The Australian http://bit.ly/s63Wiv and in Mumbrella and AdNews etc.

    1. Bingo! Slapping up a Facebook page and a Twitter account to push your articles online, does not a News Community Manager make! 😛

  3. A very interesting article! It’s something not often discussed online. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s someone in Facebook who got kicked out for using a pseudonym. Perhaps it happens if he’s also copying a real person’s entire identity.

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